Pull Over, NASCAR Dads

Single women under 65--those separated, widowed, divorced or never married--represent at least 24 percent of the voting-age population and a whopping 46 percent of voting-age women.

According to an influential study by the Democratic pollsters Stan Greenberg and Celinda Lake, they tend to be progressive and to lean Democratic. Indeed, if the nation's 45 million single women voted at the same rate as married women--52 percent versus 68 percent--there would be 6 million more voters in the electorate, and Gore would be in the White House today. Had they turned out at the same rate as other voters in Florida in 2000, there would have been an additional 202,640 votes cast in that state--and no razor-thin 537-vote margin.

Party leaders like Ann Lewis, national chair of the DNC's Women's Vote Center, want the Democratic Party to cultivate single women and connect them with the polling booth; Page Gardner and Christina Desser have founded Women's Voices, Women Vote (www.wvwv.org), to reach out and register them. You've probably read about attempts to woo these "Sex and the City voters" in one of the dozens of nearly identical articles that have come out since Greenberg and Lake's study was released in December.

It's about time! The silly nickname aside (most unmarried women live for a month on what Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte spent on lunch and taxis) single women are a natural constituency for the Democratic Party: They tend to be pro-choice, anti-gun, socially liberal and supporters of "big government."

Single women's main issues are, theoretically, Democratic strong suits: healthcare, employment, education. Certainly it makes more sense to cultivate them than the other demographic superstars pollsters have come up with: the suburban soccer moms that were supposed to save the party's bacon in the late 1990s but have since morphed into security moms, keen on defense; or the NASCAR dads--blue-collar white men from rural and Southern parts, who tend to be conservative, live in "red" states and drawn to the racial-gender politics of the Republican Party. (Whatever happened to the waitress mom? I kind of liked her.)

The focus on single women is good in another way. For years we've been hearing that the problem with the Democratic Party was that it was too liberal, too limp-wristed, insufficiently attentive to religious voters and--especially--too pro-choice. The American Prospect's Michael Tomasky recently suggested that Democratic intransigence on abortion rights was alienating religious swing voters. Why not court them, he suggested, if not by naming an anti-choicer as the vice presidential candidate, then by having an anti-choice speaker at the convention?

Well, perhaps because that would demoralize the legions of feminist activists already knocking themselves out for Kerry and blur the party's message: Support for abortion rights is one of the few sharp differences between the national parties (state legislatures swarm with anti-choice Dems), one that motivates more people than it turns off. I can't tell you how many progressive women I know who voted for Gore instead of Nader specifically, and sometimes solely, because of the threat to legal abortion posed by a Bush victory.

Why is it that Republicans understand so clearly that they have to keep the base happy, while the Democrats seem to delight in insulting theirs in order to court some temperamental sliver of voters who don't like them very much? Which are there more of? So-called progressive pro-lifers who care so much about forcing pregnant women to bear children that they would pull the lever for Bush, maker of dishonest war and champion of death row? Or women and men who want abortion to be legal and who fear the encroachments of sectarian religion on private life?